Budget vs actual
Log what really happened and see how it compares to your plan, item by item.
3 min read
Your income and expense items are your plan — what you expect to earn and spend. But life rarely matches the plan exactly. Steer lets you record what actually happened and shows the gap, so your forecast stays honest.
Budgets and actuals
- A budget is the amount on an income or expense item — your expectation.
- An actual is a real transaction you log against that item — what truly happened.
Groceries budgeted at €400 but you spent €470? Log the €470 and Steer shows the €70 overspend.
Logging a transaction
From the Breakdown view, each item has a quick action to log an actual. Enter the real amount and date — keypad and chips, as always — and it's recorded against that item.
Built for the future, too
Today you log transactions yourself. Each one records where it came from, so when automatic bank sync arrives later, imported transactions will slot into the very same picture.
Seeing the difference
There are two places the comparison shows up:
The "income vs expenses" chart overlays your actual lines on top of your budgeted bars — so you can see, month by month, where reality drifted from the plan.
A dedicated budget-vs-actual view, item by item, over a trailing window — your biggest overspends and underspends, ranked.
The variance page
The variance page always looks backwards — pick This month, the Last 3 months, or the Last 6 months (it's a trailing window up to today, never a forecast).
At the top, a Portfolio: budgeted vs actual chart traces your running balance two ways: a solid line following your budget and a dotted line for the actual. The actual line tracks your budget and only moves where you've logged a transaction — so months you haven't recorded don't drag it down, and a widening gap always means a real, logged difference from plan.
Flip Break down by account to draw the same budgeted (solid) and actual (dotted) pair for each account, so you can see which account is on track and which isn't.
The Income, Expenses and by-item figures follow the same rule: an item reads exactly on budget until you log a transaction against it. So a quiet month never looks like a shortfall — only the things you've actually recorded show a variance.
You can also filter the whole page to one account — pick it from the account selector (choose All accounts to clear), or open it straight from an account on the Breakdown view. Everything (totals, chart, items and transactions) then narrows to that account.
Why it's worth doing
Tracking actuals turns Steer from a forecast into a feedback loop:
- Spot the categories that consistently blow past their budget.
- Tighten your projection so future months are more accurate.
- Catch a creeping cost before it becomes a habit.
Tip
You don't need to log every coffee. Focus on the categories that tend to surprise you — that's where the budget-vs-actual view pays off most.